More hot bumping action

Lents again; here’s a link to 2016 if you want to re-live the past. It was a great week, full of thrills and excitement. Caius weren’t up to it (as prefigured by Mays) and were caught by Downing on the first day; Maggie patiently bumped Pembroke then Caius to get their shot at Downing on day 3. Regrettably, Downing’s rudder strings broke at the top of the reach1, so we didn’t get a clean kill; but LMBC were clearly faster (see for example this). Jesus rowed over as women’s head; Clare rose to second.

These are my videos, mostly here for my reference. But first, a nice pic of the top crews from Saturday; click for more.

The best quality carnage was M2 on Saturday, which I missed by a couple of minutes, such is always the way. Here’s someone else’s pic.

(someone cleared to the inside of Grassy, so everyone else had to go wide, and steering Grassy is hard at the best of times)

Notes

1. From the message boards: Indeed. In addition, the word on the street (here, on the river, I guess) is that, after inspection by multiple boatmen, it has been ascertained that, although Downing’s rudder strings snapped, they did so such that the Downing cox was still able to steer with the ends of the strings (hence how they managed to steer home without any issue). The Downing cox appears to have panicked and steered too hard to the right, resulting in a crash into the bank and LMBC, the clearly faster crew, overtaking them. Downing had a shot at reclaiming the headship the next day…and failed. Or, if you prefer a different vwersion, That is not true. The wire snapped as they were coming around Ditton (under tension as it was on). This caused the left toggle to fly onto the back/behind where the cox was sitting. He grabbed the remaining toggle and looked behind him for the steering mechanism to salvage it (Downing’s boat design is with the steering mechanism inside the stern of the boat, not exposed like old designs). By then the rudder was still on and they were already headed towards the bank on the reach. There was nothing he could have done.

In the comments when asked why this was published in a less than 10 year old journal (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Science) Dr Roy Spencer responded:

“Our first choice would be an AMS or AGU journal, but they have one or more gatekeepers who inevitably get involved in the review of papers with “Spencer” or “Christy” as authors.

I might remind you of the Climategate email passage “Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Trenberth also managed to get an editor to resign because Remote Sensing published one of my papers (which was never retracted though)…Trenberth apparently had some influence over that editor in the research realm.

Many of these journals are now tightly controlled to prop up the IPCC narrative.

APJAS is a high-quality journal.

[Sad to Woy falling into the paranoia pit; I’m sure there will be plenty of blogs on this -W]

I might remind you of the Climategate email passage “Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Having participated in both sides of the formal peer-review process, I’ve understood its purpose to be keeping bad science out of the literature of record. It sounds to me like RS just doesn’t want his peers to tell him he’s fooling himself.

Spencer asks his blog readers to believe that Phil Jones and Mike Mann are able to dictate review criteria to the community of climate scientists, and that Kevin Trenberth can force journal editors to resign. Spencer’s scientific peers will reject that for the fantasy it is. Sadly, though, one expects at least some of his followers to swallow it whole.

Our host, inline to above:

[Sad to Woy falling into the paranoia pit; I’m sure there will be plenty of blogs on this -W]

Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer, is the author of the book “Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics.”

[I think that has the same problem that all such pieces have; the support for free markets doesn’t come from maths, but from more general considerations (see Hayek), and from the persistent failure of central planning. Nor, of course, does the attempt to use Arrow’s words as somehow definitive on politics work either. I don’t think there is any generally current “oversimplified belief in markets as wise machines for producing optimal social outcomes”. There is a belief in them producing better outcomes than a centrally planned economy, though -W]

I don’t think there is any generally current “oversimplified belief in markets as wise machines for producing optimal social outcomes”. There is a belief in them producing better outcomes than a centrally planned economy, though

For values of ‘wise’, ‘optimal’, ‘better’, ‘centrally’, ‘planned’, etc, depending on who’s belief we’re talking about. There is also an recognition of externalized costs…

[I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by that. Given any belief, no matter how implausible, you’ll find someone expounding it; so saying “someone believes this, therefore” isn’t meaningful. I don’t quite see why you need to invoke vagueness in the meaning of “better”; are you asserting that centrally planned economies have done better at recognising externalities? I would consider that dubious -W]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by that. Given any belief, no matter how implausible, you’ll find someone expounding it; so saying “someone believes this, therefore” isn’t meaningful.

Right, I wasn’t contradicting you, just trying to point out the vagueness of those words. Fortunately, Economics uses a specialized vocabulary to reduce ambiguity. For example, ‘Pareto optimum’. And both ‘centrally’ and ‘planned’ can have a range of values. In any case, if one is reality-based, one believes that all real economies are mixtures of buying-and-selling together with planning at multiple levels of government and of detail, with greater or lesser success depending on whom you ask.

I don’t quite see why you need to invoke vagueness in the meaning of “better”; are you asserting that centrally planned economies have done better at recognising externalities?

No, I’m asserting that ‘better’ is pretty darn subjective. Some of the ‘planned’ economies of the 20th century were put in place, at least nominally, to correct the economic inequality that arises from the socialization of production costs like worker mortality. They all had unique features, but their leaders all claimed to be making things ‘better’. Did America’s New Deal, launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt, amount to a ‘centrally planned economy’? Did it fail? Would it have been ‘better’ for FDR’s government not to interfere with the free market?

[That is indeed what the Hayek type folks proposed at the time; and I don’t think they have changed their mind. I’m reading a book on it now; stay tuned for more exciting posts -W]

Sen. James M. Inhofe has raged against the scientific consensus that humans are fueling climate change, calling it “the greatest hoax” ever perpetrated on Americans. The Oklahoma Republican has blasted the Environmental Protection Agency as an “activist organization” that has unfairly burdened everyone from farmers to fossil-fuel companies.

Now the man critics once dismissed as a political outlier has an unprecedented opportunity to shape the nation’s energy and ­environmental policies. And he has helped populate the upper ranks of the agency he has derided with several of his closest confidants.

At least half a dozen former aides to Inhofe — and counting — have been hired into top positions at the EPA and the White House. The chief of staff and deputy chief of staff to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a fellow Oklahoman and longtime friend of Inhofe, spent years working for the senator. Pruitt’s senior advisers on air, climate and legal issues are Inhofe alumni. In addition, two former Inhofe aides have become top domestic and international energy and environmental advisers to President Trump….

Witness the remarks of Steve Bannon, chief strategist in Donald Trump’s White House and the former chairman of the far-right Breitbart website. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Bannon promised that the Trump era would be “as exciting as the 1930s”. (In the same interview, he said “Darkness is good” – citing Satan, Darth Vader and Dick Cheney as examples.)

The reference site for Kim Stanley Robinson
7 Mar 2017
Utopia Against Finance And Other Stories
Submitted by Kimon
Some interviews to get you warmed up for the new novel coming out next week.
Utopia Against Finance, Cli-Fi, Green Earth and New York 2140
This will be the focus of NY2140. The theme: a socialist realist history of a potential transition to post-capitalism.

This keynote for “Climate Futures: This Changes Everything” for the Environmental Humanities Center in UC Santa Barbara, recorded in his house, sums it up:
[link to video at the web page]
Another very interesting discussion is that of the future of cities and ways of living when the sea level rises due to climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson and architect Usman Haque get us to Rising Sea Levels: London in 2080 in this transatlantic videoconference / thought experiment! — organized by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and The Bartlett School of Architecture and moderated by Sheldon Brown and David Kirsch (May 2016). The video of the event is online (don’t get discouraged by the bad audio quality in the first minutes)
[links at the web page]

I’m a high school biology teacher. Climate change is part of the curriculum directly in my International Baccalaureate classes and touched upon in my marine biology and general biology classes.

I recently asked for the free EPA climate change report that was offered up to educators. But today I got this unsolicited glossy book to convince K-12 educators that climate change is not in fact settled science. My google search mostly leads me to the NIPCC self-propaganda and my time is limited to pursue this.

My crowd-sourced questions: (1) who is this group and what’s the back story? (2) are they mass distributing these to educators everywhere or was I targeted because I got the recent EPA report? Can any of you help with those questions?

The White House blueprint saves $115 million by eliminating NASA’s Office of Education, arguing that it was “performing functions that are duplicative of other parts of the agency.”

The budget targets the agency’s work on environmental science, cutting funding for Earth science research grants. It would also eliminate several missions that are still in development, including Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, which was was intended to monitor the Earth’s ocean health; the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, or OCO-3, an instrument to precisely monitor the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; and the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory, or CLARREO, pathfinder, which would have used a solar spectrometer to produce highly accurate climate projections.

The White House would also cut NASA’s role in the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite that was originally proposed by former Vice President Al Gore, who has long warned of the dangers of climate change.

NOAA’s budget for Earth and ocean sciences would also suffer under the proposal, which eliminates more than $250 million in grants and programs that support coastal and marine management, research and education.